A Universal History of Iniquity
A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges
Actually I read this as part of the big “Collected Fictions” omnibus, but I’m not going to get through that in one chunk so I figure let’s mention Borges as I finish the original collections.
I know Borges only from “Library of Babel” and the title story of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” And by reputation, of course- as the single most significant literary voice from Latin America all century, as someone who redefined genre fiction, an unparalleled prose stylist and genius mind. It’s odd, to read a collection by someone who has been pre-presented to you as seminal and a genius- odd, because you find yourself reading everything for hints of that, rather than for the text themselves. This is Borges’ first collection, and I don’t yet see what I know comes later- his obsessions with labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, or the incredibly strange and inventive mind that gave us the infinite Library. But I do see so much else- his dense, direct, and unexpected prose, plus his obsessions with duels, chance, and identity, and murderers, villains, street-thugs, and knife-fighters.
Universal History of Iniquity is not so wildly strange as what I know he does later (only in the last section, “et cetera,” do we start to see the dream-worlds of the exotic Arab used to both reflect and muddy the themes of the far more realistic stories that come before) but it is a wonderful concept for a collection. These are the more-or-less fictionalized life stories of a collection of monumental evil-doers. Some are highly recognizable (Billy the Kid, or figures from Gangs of New York) and some are obscure. The stories are wild patchworks of allusions that aren’t explicitly recognized and explicit citations that are bogus. The overall impression is of shifting and unstable reality, echoed (or maybe meant to echo) the issues of identity- all these characters change their names and identities, and this slipping of skin is both their greatest triumph of self-fashioning and, our narrator seems to imply, somehow closely related to their great sins.
I would LOVE to do some close detail work on identity in Borges, here, because I read all this at an airport gate at 7 in the morning and I feel like there is so much going on behind his sparse exterior- these stories have that very distinctive feel of fiction that, once you have read the author’s collected corpus and stewed on the themes and understood the concerns, will reveal so much more on future readings. And, as so often happens, I end up frustrated with myself for not being able to pick out in detail everything that is going on here, all the ways his stories reflect on each other and his central concerns- all I get is the overwhelming feeling that SOMETHING is there and my speculations on identity are only the start of it.
In short, I’m going to adore Borges, but I can’t read too much of him at once.
Actually I read this as part of the big “Collected Fictions” omnibus, but I’m not going to get through that in one chunk so I figure let’s mention Borges as I finish the original collections.
I know Borges only from “Library of Babel” and the title story of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” And by reputation, of course- as the single most significant literary voice from Latin America all century, as someone who redefined genre fiction, an unparalleled prose stylist and genius mind. It’s odd, to read a collection by someone who has been pre-presented to you as seminal and a genius- odd, because you find yourself reading everything for hints of that, rather than for the text themselves. This is Borges’ first collection, and I don’t yet see what I know comes later- his obsessions with labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, or the incredibly strange and inventive mind that gave us the infinite Library. But I do see so much else- his dense, direct, and unexpected prose, plus his obsessions with duels, chance, and identity, and murderers, villains, street-thugs, and knife-fighters.
Universal History of Iniquity is not so wildly strange as what I know he does later (only in the last section, “et cetera,” do we start to see the dream-worlds of the exotic Arab used to both reflect and muddy the themes of the far more realistic stories that come before) but it is a wonderful concept for a collection. These are the more-or-less fictionalized life stories of a collection of monumental evil-doers. Some are highly recognizable (Billy the Kid, or figures from Gangs of New York) and some are obscure. The stories are wild patchworks of allusions that aren’t explicitly recognized and explicit citations that are bogus. The overall impression is of shifting and unstable reality, echoed (or maybe meant to echo) the issues of identity- all these characters change their names and identities, and this slipping of skin is both their greatest triumph of self-fashioning and, our narrator seems to imply, somehow closely related to their great sins.
I would LOVE to do some close detail work on identity in Borges, here, because I read all this at an airport gate at 7 in the morning and I feel like there is so much going on behind his sparse exterior- these stories have that very distinctive feel of fiction that, once you have read the author’s collected corpus and stewed on the themes and understood the concerns, will reveal so much more on future readings. And, as so often happens, I end up frustrated with myself for not being able to pick out in detail everything that is going on here, all the ways his stories reflect on each other and his central concerns- all I get is the overwhelming feeling that SOMETHING is there and my speculations on identity are only the start of it.
In short, I’m going to adore Borges, but I can’t read too much of him at once.